the olllam bring uilleann pipes and Vulfpeck's bassist to The Alluvion on Nov. 16

John McSherry's genre-blurring folk band ends its fall U.S. run with a Monday night at the small Commongrounds venue in Traverse City.

On a Monday in mid-November, the room upstairs at Commongrounds will hold one of the stranger lineups to come through town this fall: a master of the Irish uilleann pipes, the bassist from Vulfpeck, and a band whose name has three L's.

the olllam play The Alluvion in Traverse City on Monday, Nov. 16, with the show starting at 9 p.m. Tickets are through The Alluvion's box office. The room holds 180, which makes it the smallest stop we know of on the band's fall U.S. tour.

The band is led by uilleann piper John McSherry. The lineup includes Joe Dart of Vulfpeck, Michael Shimmin, Ross Ainslie, Seán O'Meara and Joe Hettinga. Put a traditional Irish piper next to one of the most-watched bass players on the internet and you get the olllam's sound: traditional melodies laid over grooves and textures that pull from far outside the folk world.

The most recent album the band's listings point to is *elllegy*, which came out in 2022 and was the record they took home to Ireland. The band also carries an RTÉ Radio 1 award for Best Group. They've spent this fall on both sides of the Atlantic. The Irish run opened at Dublin's Olympia Theatre on Oct. 5, followed by U.S. dates: Nashville on Nov. 3, Atlanta on Nov. 4, Washington, D.C. on Nov. 6, Philadelphia on Nov. 8, Boston on Nov. 10 at the Sinclair in Cambridge, and Detroit on Nov. 13. Traverse City is the last date we have listed, three nights after Detroit.

The Alluvion is a good room for this. The venue opened in 2023) on the second floor of the community-owned Commongrounds Cooperative building on Eighth Street. It was backed early on by grants to Crosshatch Center for Arts & Ecology, the nonprofit that planned the space with Commongrounds. Its programming mixes regional and touring musicians with spoken word, film and comedy. A small listening room is where pipes and bass meet on even terms. In a club this size you'll hear both clearly.

Put a traditional Irish piper next to one of the most-watched bass players on the internet and you get the olllam.

What to know: the posted start is 9 p.m., late for a Monday, so plan the evening around it. With 180 tickets for a band that played the Olympia in Dublin a few weeks earlier, this one isn't likely to have walk-up space. Buy through The Alluvion's own link above.

Most of what comes through Traverse City in November is local and regional. A touring band at the end of a transatlantic fall, in a room this small on a Monday, is the kind of night people talk about afterward.

Sources: The Alluvion: the olllam tickets (thealluvion.ludus.com); Dolans: the olllam (dolans.ie); Journal of Music: Olllam listing (journalofmusic.com); DublinTown: the olllam (dublintown.ie); The Sinclair: the olllam (sinclaircambridge.com); Wikipedia: Alluvion (music venue) (en.wikipedia.org); Traverse Ticker: Rotary Charities awards $270K in grants (traverseticker.com); Northern Express: Inside the Alluvion (northernexpress.com)